In your day-to-day business life, do you often hear this kind of chatter when discussing innovation?

One of America's greatest challenges right now is a serious case of “uncertainty,” a disease that translates into established corporations as well as many entrepreneurs doing nothing but the same-old-same-old predictable stuff. You know what I mean.

It's an era where the bean counter and the cost-cutter have become corporate heroes – even when people with brains know that exhaustive penny pinching means that many an organization has been gutted to the core. How else do we have high corporate profits and huge cash hoardings, yet modest hiring, for example?

This pandemic of risk aversion runs all the way up to, sadly, our national innovation leaders. Such as Apple. A gold iPhone. Hottest thing going.

Really?

Well, take those statements I've posed above and ponder the sticking point within the manufactured national crisis of the week: impending implementation of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

If you are being honest – not using your political reflexes – do you really think the state of American health insurance is so good (laugh, please!) that it doesn't require a jolt to fix it? And if you think the system is fine: Do you have rare Cadillac coverage or have you been blessed with great family health?

So, if the finances of the American health system need a makeover, as most people agree, what is so wrong with trying something? Trying anything?

I hear eerily familiar critiques: Obamacare is risky. Costs are unpredictable. People don't like the notion. It opens up the proverbial “can of worms” or pushes us onto “that slippery slope.”

I understand, sort of, the lingering risk-aversion following the pain of the Great Recession. But do we really think status quo will fix the health care mess – or any big problem?

Some Obamacare critics will say that the reason not to push ahead is that once the entitlement benefit is in place it will be hard to replace or change. In essence, they're asking for the impossible: a national health insurance fix that's perfect before it starts. Who said the new product has to be perfect before the experiment is undertaken?

Remember, too, that entitlements do change.

Think of welfare reform or the constant tinkering with Medicare. Cuts to unemployment benefits and food stamps. Even Social Security – seemingly the most protected of government programs – had a major remake that pushed up the full-benefit retirement age well past 65.

It feels to me that Obamacare – the law of the land – now suffers a public relations crisis that's grounded in the very same corporate risk-aversion mentality that's kept our national economy stalled in a modest recovery.

Funny, it's the same corporate sector and its political allies that are among the loudest critics of Obamacare.

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